Cox+Sample+Lesson+1

In a lesson I used early in the year, students downloaded a document from my Teachers folder that was created using a program called Omnigraffle, and a video clip from Teachers Domain that showed a team trying to "raise the Moai", the famous Easter Island statues. In this video, they found many examples of levers in use, which was the core of the science lesson of the day.

Given these instructions, students created documents that looked like this:




 * What do we want the each student to learn?
 * I wanted students to identify the three parts of a lever (fulcrum, effort arm, load arm), and to calculate the mechanical advantage of a lever.
 * How will we know when each student has learned it?
 * To complete the worksheet, students need to find a lever, label its parts, and measure and calculate its mechanical advantage. I will know that they learned it if they submit a completed diagram that included an explanation of their method.
 * The chapter test also asked them to use this method to answer questions in a contrived example.
 * What are we going to do if they don’t get it?
 * After reviewing the submitted work, I left digital comments on the document and required them to rework and resubmit the document where necessary.